Earlier this year, in what some saw as the most outrageous act of Rock & Roll decadence since Rivers Cuomo got his leg lengthened, Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos cut off his trademark fringe.

Hackneyed critics with columns to fill and hyperbole to sprout, questioned if this somehow marked the end of Franz Part 1. Was it Kapranos’ way of coming to terms with a heady 12 months which saw them go from being The Chateau’s archest act to the world’s archest named act? Did it signify a drastic new direction for everybody’s favourite new band? Or was it simply a man in his 30s having a haircut?

The truth is that before the world was trampled underfoot by ‘that riff’, few would have been able to pick out any member of Franz Ferdinand from a police line-up, even if they did snatch your handbag.

However, when their debut album appeared early last year, it arrived fully formed. It wasn’t the sound of a band trying to find their style. From the fractured mechanical riffing of ‘Matinee’ to the shimmering comedown of ‘Come on home’, it felt like the new album from a band you’d held dear for years. It just didn’t sound like a debut. There were no loose fumblings in the dark. Disparate verses and choruses weren’t clumsily spot welded together in the vain hope that they’d sound passable. And in Tor Johansen’s taut production they had found their perfect collaborator.

Johansen’s calling-card production approach, which coaxes the bass out of the shadows, to a more prominent position centrestage had worked wonders the previous decade with Swedish popsters The Cardigans on their masterpiece ‘Life’. In the hands of a lesser producer, Franz’s debut could easily have been a huge misfire, markedly outsold by labelmates Sons & Daughters and critically eclipsed by Snow Patrol.

18 months later, on the eve of the release of their sophomore effort it’s a different story.  The world awaits their new album with baited breath. Hooch gargling schoolkids in Shoreditch haven’t been this excited since Sunny Delight put a ceiling on Tartrazine levels. And shapeshifting rappers in L.A are angling for first refusal on the freshest batch of sampleable riffs.

So in an act of pure folly that exposed their artschool roots, the group named the album eponymously. Again. An act that smacked of pretension, laziness and Seal. They’ve since seen sense and have announced a new title: ‘You could have it so much better with Franz Ferdinand’. This longwinded title doesn’t appear on the front cover. The black cover instead bears their name in much the same style as before, albeit in a different 3 code colour scheme, their only other concession to disparity being the 20’s flapper girl sounding out their name.

To kick things off, the group have dispensed with the services of the aforementioned Johansen, and have instead gone with Rich Costey.

The much heralded group collaboration with Dan The Automator, thankfully didn’t come off in the end. Those who heard Alex’s yawned in vocal contribution to the Handsome Boy Modelling School album last year won’t lose any sleep over this. At best it sounded like an overly eager bid to impress Will.I.Am, Kanye and the Hip Hop fraternity. It was confused, muddy and sounded like an afterthought that nobody had the temerity to dismiss at the time. It should have stayed in the studio.

In West though, one of their most fervent supporters from the Hip Hop scene, they have a kindred spirit. He is after all the face of a new breed of rap mavericks with a social conscience who eschew the Bad Boy posturings and boxfresh obsessions of recent years. However West’s assertion that Franz are exponents of white crunk music is woefully off the mark. An eminently quotable soundbite, yes, but a confused one at that.

Franz’s remit from the start has been to make guitar music that girls can dance to, and from the ‘Darts of pleasure’ EP onwards, they have always managed to meet this criteria. What they do though is not wholly original and exhibits little spirit of experimentation. Crunk, it is not. What they do has been done before. They just do it better than anyone else.

So with the album release only weeks away, what does the future hold for the band clumsily named after an architect of the 1904 Namibian genocide? If the album is a critical and commercial success, it could see Franz becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, eclipsing the likes of Coldplay and REM. It could see Kapranos trading in his mumsy girlfriend Eleanor Friedberger for a newer, more super model.

If it flops however, heads will roll at Domino, and they will no longer be the geese that laid the golden eggs. Retreating to their Chateau (An actual chateau this time, not the derelict courthouse that was their HQ during the early years) they’ll emerge years later blinking in the twilight to play the occasional pub gig to ageing hipsters in Govan. Fatter, shinier of pate and scowling at a cruel, heartless world that has since moved on.

The early indicators for the new album however are good. The new songs roadtested during their neverending tour suggest business as usual. The first single from the album is ‘Do you want to’ (Oh how they flout the laws of punctuation!) Whilst not the epiphany that ‘Take me out’ was, it is still one of the best things you’ll hear this year.   As long as they haven’t lost sight of what they do best, that second album, due next month, should be superb, if not epoch defining.

Ash Barua

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